


Landslide

by gnomesb4trolls



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Eleven | Jane Hopper Needs A Hug, Eleven | Jane Hopper is a Byers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28417464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnomesb4trolls/pseuds/gnomesb4trolls
Summary: Before she leaves Hawkins with the Byers, there's one last thing that Eleven wants to do.El goes back to the lab and faces her demons, but she doesn't have to do it alone.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Mike Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper & The Party, Jonathan Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Joyce Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17





	Landslide

The week after Joyce told them they were leaving Hawkins was a quiet one in the Byers house.

At least, El thought so. She’d only just started to notice things again: for a long time the world had drifted in and out of focus, sounds and smells and people slipping by too quickly for her to catch them. It had been easier not to try, to let them come and go while she pulled the gray fog around her like a blanket.

If she didn’t try to touch anything, maybe she wouldn’t hurt anymore.

But the fog rolled back on its own, little by little, and there was color and movement again, and she found that she could focus on things around her for a little bit at a time, as long as she didn’t try too hard. As long as she kept the tendrils of her heart curled in her chest, where they couldn’t try to grab onto anything that would just get ripped away, carrying a part of her with it.

It was easier, to pretend that she wasn’t really here.

They were sitting at the table, eating dinner, but no one was talking.

El swallowed a wad of spaghetti. Her throat felt tight. The only sound was the plink of forks, the squeak of Will’s chair as he reached across the table to grab another piece of bread. Everything looked too bright, too close, as if she’d just been shaken awake from a long dream. Sometimes, in the lab, she’d woken in the middle of the night from nightmares she could never remember, blinking in the harsh fluorescent glare. Sometimes she’d left the lights on on purpose when she went to sleep, counting on their constant, familiar hum to pull her back to reality if she ended up somewhere she didn’t want to be.

She hadn’t known this until now, but she’d gotten used to the Byers’ talking during dinner. For the first few days after she’d come to stay with them they’d tried to include her, until they saw how much she was struggling to put words together. They mostly stopped asking her questions after that, but somehow she still felt like she was a part of their talking, or she could be; it wasn’t like in the lab when the doctors had talked about her as though she wasn’t there. Even though she couldn’t really follow what they were saying most of the time, the rise and fall of their voices came to feel comforting, familiar. Something that she counted on to stay the same, like the color of the tile in the bathroom or the pattern that the nightlight in Will’s room made on the ceiling.

El was trying to swallow another wad of spaghetti through the lump in her throat when Joyce turned to her with a quiet smile. “El, honey, I forgot to say this the other day, but if there’s anything in particular that you want to do in Hawkins before we leave, let me know and we’ll try to make it happen.”

“Thanks,” she swallowed the spaghetti, then started to wind more onto her fork the way Will had shown her, the first time they’d had spaghetti for dinner after Starcourt. That had been a good night: by the end of it they’d all been laughing, and her chest had hurt because it had felt so good and so wrong to laugh again, both feelings twisting around her heart at the same time until she couldn’t separate one from the other.

Tonight, Will and Jonathan both stared at their plates as if their gazes were glued there. Ever since Joyce had told them they were moving, she’d watched them feel sad, and tried to figure out what she herself felt. She knew that she would miss Mike, and Dustin and Lucas and Max and Steve and Nancy, all of these people who now felt like they were hers, but she didn’t know what to feel about Hawkins itself. Her life had started here, her real life outside of the lab, but she didn’t know if another place would feel different, if it would feel like the fresh start that Joyce said they needed.

She put down her fork. “If it’s all right, I want…” she took a breath. “I want to go back to the lab.”

Something changed in Joyce’s face, just for a second, and El couldn’t decide what it was before it disappeared. “I think we can make that happen.”

Jonathan looked up from his food. “I can take you, El, if you want. Maybe next week after school one day?”

She nodded, giving him a tentative smile. “Thanks.”

No one asked why she wanted to go back there, and she was glad. She wasn’t sure if she could have explained it. All she knew was that that place, that place she had fought so hard to escape, still tugged at her. Maybe if she saw for herself that the bad men were gone for good, she wouldn’t be so scared anymore.

Hopper was gone now, and if he could be gone, just like that, then anything could happen to her.

Jonathan brought it up again the next Saturday morning. El was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a solitary Eggo and thinking that the light slanting across the floor already looked paler than it had last week. It was still early September, but she could feel winter coming.

Joyce was at work, and Will had left a while ago on his bike, so she was the only one there when Jonathan shuffled out of his room, rubbing his eyes. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table across from her.

“Is everyone else gone?”

El nodded, glancing down at her plate. She hadn’t spent a lot of time alone with Jonathan, but she never felt like he was impatient for her to talk, and she liked that. “You slept late.”

He smiled at her. “Yeah, every so often I like to do that on a Saturday.” His face rearranged itself into more serious lines as he looked at her. “I was thinking about when we could go to the lab,” he said. “I’m free after school on Tuesday, if that sounds OK?”  
She felt like there was a fishhook in her insides, and she almost told him to forget the whole thing. This was her last chance, though, and she didn’t want to lose it. “Yes,” she said.

Jonathan nodded. “Is there anyone else you want to invite, like for moral support? Mike, or anyone?”

She shook her head. “No.” The thought of having Mike there with her was appealing in some ways, but she knew that it upset him when she was upset, and it didn’t feel fair to put him through that. This was a part of her story that was only hers, that belonged to the person she’d been before she met him.

“All right, then.” He looked curious, but he didn’t ask any questions. “I’ll come by and pick you up right after school.”

“Three-fifteen,” she said.

Jonathan smiled at her. He had a nice smile. “Three-fifteen.”

On Tuesday, when El climbed into Jonathan’s car, Will was already sitting in the passenger seat.

He turned to look at her over his shoulder. “Is it OK if I come?”

She nodded. “But—why?”

Will gave her a little smile. She still didn’t feel like she knew him very well, but she never felt like she had to pretend anything for him either. “I want to be there for you. Like you were there for me.”

She smiled back at him, even though her face felt stiff. They just looked at each other for a minute, and even though he looked so much older now, she could see the boy whose hand she had first taken in the Upside Down. “OK. Thank you.”

He nodded, and Jonathan glanced at her in the rearview window. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

The truth was, there was really only one thing in the lab that she wanted to see.

Her feet still knew the way, even though it meant passing through rooms and hallways that she had rarely visited. She could feel Will and Jonathan behind her, keeping their distance but unmistakably there, watching her back.

It felt like a long time before she was standing outside the right door. She’d thought that she might not remember which one it was, but as soon as they stepped into the hallway she knew.

El opened the door.

She’d half expected that the room would be completely bare, but it wasn’t.

Her plant and her stuffed lion were gone, and the drawing she’d hung on the wall, but everything else was just the same as it had been the day she left. The bed was still there, with the same white blanket neatly tucked into the metal frame. She sat down, feeling her weight sink into the narrow mattress. Her breath caught as she glanced up at the camera in the corner, its lens still pointed at her even though the red light was off. It was hard to believe that there wasn’t someone there, watching her.

“You can come in,” she said to Will and Jonathan, who had both stopped in the doorway, still giving her space.

“Is this where you slept?” Jonathan asked, his voice quiet. El nodded.

“It’s so small,” Will said, pacing towards the other end of the room.

“It felt bigger then,” El said. Bigger than the dark room they’d locked her in when she was bad. Big enough that some nights the darkness had felt like a thing with teeth that would swallow her up, given the chance.

Jonathan was looking up at the camera in the corner. “Did they watch you all of the time?”

“Yes,” El said. She had no idea what had happened to the tapes, if they were still in some closet somewhere. She didn’t want to know.

Neither of them said anything else, but she was glad that they were there. Maybe the presence watching her was the ghost of the little girl she’d been. Maybe the fact that she wasn’t alone would prove to that angry, lonely child that everything was going to be all right. Maybe not a hundred percent all right, but better than she could have imagined during all of those lonely nights.

For a few minutes, she sat there and stared at the blank wall, the same wall that she’d spent so many years of her life memorizing, and remembered what it had felt like to be that little girl, the roughness of the hospital gown against her skin, cold air prickling her shaved scalp. She didn’t like to remember, but maybe it was the only way to really leave this place.

It’s going to be all right, she said in her mind, the image of her past self bright and clear. You saved us, and we’re going to be all right now.

“I’m ready to go.”

The sun dazzled her when she walked outside, even though they hadn’t been in the lab for long. She blinked, eyes watering, and then her vision cleared and she saw that they weren’t alone.

Steve’s car was parked in the lot, right next to Nancy’s, and they were all there: Steve leaning against his back bumper, sunglasses on; Dustin and Lucas, arguing about something, as usual; Max squinting up at the grim bulk of the building, her face serious; and Mike, standing next to Nancy.

He was the first person to see her, and she walked across the parking lot towards him, her chest tight.

“How did you…” She wasn’t even sure how to ask the question.

“I hope you’re not mad,” he said. “Will mentioned to Dustin that you were doing this, and we thought…”

“We thought you might need our assistance!” Dustin finished. El had been so focused on Mike that she hadn’t noticed that they were all clustered around her now, maintaining a respectful distance like Will and Jonathan in the lab, but still surrounding her. “When a party member requires assistance, it’s our duty to provide it.”

El smiled at him, and he smiled back, that same sweet smile that she’d grown to love so much.

Steve, standing beside Dustin, gave him a look over his sunglasses.

“But of course, we understand that you might want to be alone right now, and if you do then we’ll respect your wishes.” The words sounded rehearsed, and she felt her smile widening.

“Seriously, though,” Steve said, taking a step towards her and giving her his best older-brother look, “Just say the word, and I take all of these shitheads home.”

For a few seconds El couldn’t speak. In the lab she’d felt numb, as though she was sleepwalking. Now, though, she felt something inside of her wake up. The sun was shining, and they had all come here for her. She blinked tears out of her eyes.

“It’s OK,” she said. “I’m glad you’re all here.”

Steve nodded and reached over to squeeze her shoulder, and Dustin broke into a grin. “Great! We were thinking we could go out for ice cream, to cheer you up.”

“I like ice cream.”

Dustin and Lucas resumed their argument, which as it turned out was about where they should go for ice cream: now that Scoops Ahoy was gone, along with the rest of the mall, they had two ice cream parlors in town to choose from, and there were some differing opinions among the party about which one was better.

She stood with Mike a little apart from where they had all clustered. The sound of their voices made her feel more real than anything ever had.

“Are you really OK?” Mike asked, his voice low.

She nodded. “I needed—to say goodbye.”

“That makes sense.”

He put an arm around her, and she rested her head on his shoulder. He was taller now, they both were, but if she closed her eyes she could recall exactly how it had felt to ride behind him on his bike, her cheek pressed against his jacket, his body and her anger the only things standing between her and the darkness that wanted to swallow her whole.

Max walked over to them and took El’s other hand, giving it a little squeeze. “How long do you think they’ll keep it up?”

Will had joined the argument; he seemed to be trying to mediate between Dustin and Lucas, who were both yelling and waving their arms around. Steve was standing to one side, the familiar exasperated look on his face, while Jonathan and Nancy looked on from a few feet away, both wearing amused expressions.

“I give it fifteen minutes,” Mike said.

Max tilted her head to one side, considering. The pale sunlight caught her hair, making the strands look like they were giving off sparks. “Ten,” she said. “But only because I don’t think Steve will last any longer than that.”

It was exactly twelve minutes, according to Mike’s watch, before an increasingly agitated Steve intervened, yelling at them to shut up and get in the car already, dammit, or I’m never driving you anywhere again. A subdued Dustin and Lucas muttered apologies and slid quietly into Steve’s backseat, though by now they all knew that it was an empty threat. Max ran after them, calling shotgun, and El and Mike made their way over to Nancy’s car, where Jonathan and Will were already waiting, and they caravanned into town for ice cream.

Much later that night—after ice cream sundaes, and then burgers because by the time they finished it was dinnertime, and then a quiet ride back to where Jonathan had parked his car, stoplights glowing in the twilight, El gave the lab one last look. It would probably always scare her, but it was in the past now, where it belonged.

Will was half-asleep in the passenger seat by the time they pulled into the Byers’ driveway, but El was wide awake, watching for the yellow glow of the porch light that meant they had come home.


End file.
